End Game
by Eric Vought
Summary: The IOA uses the Atlantis "Game" interface to replicate Earth society and industry as a last-ditch defense against the Wraith and other enemies while Tok'ra scheme to uncover their origins and resurrect their race. Targeted at novella length.  Ties together events from SG1, SGA, SGU, and movies.
1. Preface

Chapter 1  
>Preface<p>

The sapphire sphere of the Earth was visible in the lower-left quadrant of the viewport. The terminator was a sharp, black line cutting through the Mediterranean, the craters of London and Paris only visible as gaps in the glowing web of light that was the cities of Europe. Snow on the Alps was painted with the faint rosy hue of sunset. All this moved visibly below as the _Jacob Carter_ shot past in its low, fast orbit, leaving behind, too, the vast spidery framework of _Miolnir_, Earth's first orbital construction yard, far above them.

Crew members moved in and out of the instrument-lit space of the Bridge with purpose but no great hurry, carrying reports or checking readings. Technically, they were on watch while the (rebuilt) Antarctic weapons platform was offline for maintenance, but, since no one else was supposed to know that, they expected no trouble. General John Shepherd sat in the newly installed _Chair_, working through a sequence of exercises to troubleshoot one of the first ever Earth-made chimeras of Ancient, Asgard, and Tokra technology. He was bored, tempted to clandestinely switch to a display of the communications feed from planet-side, which included live coverage of the 2028 Superbowl.

Tempted that is, until a swirling vortex opened and disgorged a fleet of armed vessels. The giant pyramid-shapes rapidly deployed squadrons of _death gliders_ and began directing fire toward the planet below.

He dumped his hot coffee into his lap and the ship shuddered as the Ancient interface misinterpreted his reaction. Muttering several choice words, he ordered the ship to Action Stations and to prepare for launch of the ready X-305 attack planes.

Once again the ship shuddered, this time when three of the Ha'Tak motherships turned their main batteries on the _Carter_. The Earth ship's shields flared white-hot as they turned the enemy beams aside. Instantly, Shepherd was aware of the shield strength and energy reserves in his mind. Everything was holding, but concentrated fire would wear them down before too long. Responding to his thoughts once more, _Carter_ began firing its Asgard beam weapons at one of the motherships and a spread of missiles launched from its underside.

"_Miolnir_, _Miolnir_, you have enemy gliders inbound. Repeat, gliders on CBDR for attack run."

Shepherd heard the report from his tactical officer and checked the status of his attack wing. The four ready X-305s were just clearing the bay and heading for the stream of gliders. More would be ready to launch in minutes, but they did not necessarily have minutes. A fresh set of impacts from staff blasts made up his mind for him.

"Alright, enough of this: I'm missing the kickoff. Hold on, people, activating the Miagi program!" That was when things began to change quickly.

Another blue vortex opened up in front of them and _Carter_ accelerated into it. Their view of Earth vanished to be replaced by a black starfield and a sliver of the moon. Then the ship rotated underneath them, bringing the edge of North America into view, spinning rapidly away. They had passed entirely through the Earth in an eye-blink and put themselves in an eccentric, elliptical orbit. _Miolnir_ passed beneath them against the backdrop of the Atlantic Ocean and the broad sweep of death gliders were now in front of them. Asgard beams sliced out again, enemy gliders hemorrhaging air and flames. Some of them jinked back and forth against their base vector to avoid the sudden menace.

Now they were coming up on the three motherships which had been firing at them. Asgard beams lanced out just as the missiles launched earlier were reaching the end of their flight path. Far short of the Ha'Tak vessals, they exploded in a naqueda-enhanced nuclear inferno, eye-achingly brilliant but harmless against the enemy shields. Small devices at the tip of each one flared bright as they vaporized, a human design from the 1950s made with Goa'uld and Asgard technology. Energy from the explosions was channeled into invisible but powerful gamma rays which drained energy from already stressed enemy shields. One Ha'Tak vanished in an incandescent cloud while another rolled away with its hull glowing from the heat.

The remaining Ha'Tak from that group spun quickly to bring its guns to bear and a red tongue reached for the _Carter_... which was already gone again, passed through hyperspace and right past the enemy, hurtling at the second group of motherships. The _Carter_ spun like a top as it came out of the vortex, focusing its beams first on its remaining attacker and then on the cluster of ships bombarding Earth. Once again it vanished before the enemy could respond, leaving several more missiles behind, and now it was bearing down on an isolated ship, tearing into it with bright blue coherent particle beams.

The Lucian Alliance attackers, deciding they had had enough, opened hyperspace windows of their own. Only a few minutes after the attack began, all but two of the vessels, damaged and leaking air, as well a shattered squadron of eager-to-surrender gliders, was all that was left of the enemy in orbit. Shepherd scanned the Chair's mind-link quickly for damage reports, secured the ship from General Quarters, and brought himself back into the physical world. He blinked for a moment at the sudden intrusion of the now bustling activity of the bridge and then headed into the main corridor, leaving Colonel Snoodgras in charge of cleanup operations.

A legubrious man with a crooked smirk and a receding hairline was already there, walking toward the lift.

"McKay! I didn't know you were onboard, how's it going, Pal?"

"Still _dead_, thanks so much for asking."

Shepherd made an annoyed grunt and walked straight through the scientist to hit the lift controls. The doors came open of their own accord before he could reach them. The two of them got into the lift.

"Asgard Core, I presume?" entoned the late Rodney McKay in a porterly voice. The lift started moving "downward".

"Yeah, I figured I would see how the new systems are holding up seeing as we just took them into combat the first time, since I'm missing the game and all, anyway."

Rodney smiled smugly. "You're not missing it, I started recording it when the Lucian Alliance showed up."

"Rodney, how thoughtful, but since when do you care about football?"

"Since I have a bet with Snoodgras on the Giants. Two cases of twinkies and a pound of really good coffee. I had the Asgard systems crunch all of game statistics since the dawn of football and come up with the spread: I can-not lose."

The lift stopped, the door opened, and Shepherd walked out of the lift, calling over his shoulder, "and what in hell are you going to do with twinkies and coffee if you win?"

"Sure, rub it in why don't you." Rodney McKay said sulkily under his non-breath. The hologram vanished.

McKay was already there when he got to the Asgard Core. He, General Samantha Carter, US Air Force (ret.), and a diminutive Air Force Major Jennifer Hailey were all staring at a holographic schematic which hovered over the computer core. It seemed to show patterns of light passing in and out of a luminous hermit crab.

Sam Carter turned as he came in and smiled, her grey hair longer than it had been when she was in the Air Force and held back with a hand-carved Athosian clasp made from a wood with deep gold tones. She was wearing a generic SGC uniform with a contractor badge. "As you can see, the UMP held up during the entire engagement. Of, course, if it hadn't, none of us would be here to know it."

"Probably end up in the Earth's mantel or something. You'd all be dead and I'd have to go back to my last backup. Course, then I could forget about that weird dream I had involving Jennifer Love Hewitt, a row boat, and a bucket of fried chicken... oh, and a whale. The chicken ended up having lemon in the batter and I started breaking out in hives in the middle of..."

"Rodney," Carter interrupted him, "not now."

"Uh, right, well, anyway, Sam's right, the Miagi program worked flawlessly, even if I had to find out by going through the logs after it was all over, having been rudely swapped out when it suddenly sucked up all the computing resources in the ship..."

"I didn't even know you were here. Besides, it was rather important," Shepherd interrupted him, "But what concerns me more is that the shields seemed to be drained more by our hyperdrive than by enemy fire. A little bit longer and they wouldn't have needed to shoot us."

"Well, we were opening back to back hyperdrive windows while maneuvering, firing beam weapons..." Hailey reached into the hologram and switched it to a display of energy usage which made even less sense to him than the space crab diagram they had up earlier.

"...not to mention the Universal Multi-Processor," McKay gestured grandly to the array of pulsating equipment taking up one wall of the Core room, "which, I might add, made the whole Miagi-thing possible: 'Best defense, no be there.'"

"So you're responsible for the stupid name... but don't suck up all the credit old HAL, the Asgard built the micro-jumping technology into the O'Neill before their homeworld got Replicatored."

"Actually, Sir," Hailey said with a hint of annoyance, "_I_ came up with the stupid name, but the O'Neill was just a prototype. The Asgard never got the technology working. Even with the newest Computer Core they gave us there wasn't enough processing power to calculate precise hyperspace windows one after another in combat, close to a big gravity well, dumping exactly the right amount of inertia to change orbits and so forth. In fact, there wasn't enough processing power in the whole universe to do what we just did..."

"Enter," said Rodney triumphantly, "the UMP, which uses multiple universes, an infinite number actually, to do the calculation for us without blowing up any solar systems in the process: 100% environmentally friendly, non-cataclysmic computing. But it does use a lot of juice."

"The bottom line is that it did work, even if we weren't intending to test it for another month and I think we can fine-tune from here. How did the Ancient-interface work?"

"Not bad. I ended up having to choose pre-selected attack patterns because it was too much work to tell the Core what I really wanted it to do, but it did a good job of fitting the pattern to the tactical situation. I think we can work up a better selection of patterns with some sim-time and training. I might even be able to teach Major Smurfette here to fly it."

Major Hailey glowered at him. General Shepherd had been inspecting an off-world outpost when she had been turned bright-blue by an alien plant. Given her size and color, the General had come up with the nickname and it had unfortunately stuck.

General Shepherd suddenly became thoughtful, "How did we do ground-side?"

"Not great, Sir," Hailey answered pulling up another hologram. This one he did understand, being a view of Africa with a disturbing number of flashing red circles, "They were targeting IOA headquarters in North Africa. The shield held off most of the bombardment, but there were civilian casualties in surrounding areas, especially families of personnel outside the Green Zone. Their orbit," the display zoomed out and showed a track cutting across the equator and toward Antarctica, "would have taken them past IP-COM and McMurdo, which they clearly knew was offline or they would have taken it out first. The IOA estimates two-thousand dead, maybe that much again in wounded, mostly people blinded or burned by the flash.

"The other interesting thing is that the attacking Ha'Taks had significant upgrades in the last ten years, both in shields and firepower. If they hadn't cut and run, they could have taken us and destroyed Earth's defenses. My question is: how did they know?"

Carter switched off the display and crossed her arms, leaning back against the console, "This isn't the first time the Lucian Alliance has shown up out of nowhere. The IOA rooted out three highly placed moles in the last twenty years, including a zatarc. Apparently we haven't gotten them all. I have a feeling, whatever their source is, that they are going to be very interested in 'Miagi'."

Shepherd's earpiece chimed, "CIC to General Shepherd."

He subvocalized, "Shepherd here, go ahead CIC."

"Have FLASH traffic from IP-COM: Lucian Alliance troops on the ground at McMurdo, the _Carter_ ordered to provide X-305 support. You are requested to return to base, immediately."

"Well, folks, it's been fun," he said aloud and, through the comm, "Major, Tell the Colonel for me he officially has his ship back. Ready to transport."

With a flash of light and the sharp smell of ozone, the ship vanished around him.


	2. Ch 1 Painful Lessons

Chapter 1  
>Painful Lessons<p>

I materialized in the _Atlantis_ gateroom with a rucksack on my shoulder amid a dozen other new personnel, including an attractive young doctor. Along with almost everyone else, I stared around, mesmerized for a moment by the colored light filtering through the windows onto the softly glowing, symbol-encrusted steps, the graceful sweep of balconies and archways, the smell of the salty breeze. A trio of marines stood watching us as we waited for someone to tell us where to go, what to do, and what forms needed to be filled out. I wobbled for a moment on the Canadian crutch and readjusted the load of the rucksack, took a deep breath and steadied myself, feeling the still unaccustomed feather touch of an alien mind as it adjusted my blood flow and dampened the pain.

"I'm Amelia Banks, welcome to Atlantis. Everyone please follow me to the infirmary where you will get your final clearance from the Chief of Medicine. If you leave your bags where they are, they will be taken to your new quarters."

"Um, Amelia?" said the doctor next to me, "I kindof _am_ the Chief of Medicine."

"Ah, yes, Dr... Keller, Right? Welcome aboard. Everyone, please, follow me..." she frowned, looking at a data pad in her hand and then up to me, "Except for 'Jason Higgs'. You've been pre-cleared. Master Seargant Bolton will be here in a moment to take you to your assignment."

I gave a thin smile and waved away Doctor Keller's concern. She was one of only a handful of people on Atlantis who knew who and what I was. I did need to visit the infirmary, but I would do it when it was a little less... crowded. Dropping the rucksack, I moved to sit on the edge of a step as everyone else filed out. Closing my eyes, I breathed in the sea air and imagined the Outer Banks, the rush of the surf and the heavy feel of sand on my sneakers as I jogged through the dunes.

"Mr. Higgs?" a marine extended his hand to me as I akwardly rose from the step, "Master Seargant Bolton. Please come with me." He eyed me warily, taking particular note of my sidearm and complete lack of insignia.

About twenty people stood in the Hologram Room, Nola and Baden next to each other in the first row, having gotten past much of their personal enmity but still not quite comfortable with each other.

"You have just had a demonstration of what Tau'ri small arms can do. Here we will put it into perspective," I gestured to the hologram woman who stood on the pedastal. She disappeared and was replaced by graphic footage of World War II, a montage of destruction. Soldiers with machine-guns fought back and forth over devastated urban landscapes, bombs fell from aircraft amid factories and schools, a tank lurched forward over a line of infantry, naval vessals pounded each other with artillery, and finally, lines of triumphant German soldiers and pictures of emaciated survivors of death camps. I had to admit that the Altarans built one hell of a home theater system. Even knowing what would be shown, it was hard to not get caught up in the flood of images, overwhelmed by the concussion of the bombs and the staccato of the guns.

"Sixty million people died in this one conflict on Earth," I paused as people gasped and let that number sink in. The number of lives lost was much higher than the total populations of their ten respective planets, "Six million people were executed in death camps for being of a race, culture, or religion people found unsavory. But it gets worse. It ended in this:"

A view of a Japanese city filled the pedastal, a perfect miniature complete with bustling traffic and plumes of smoke from the factories. A bright light seared everyone's eyes, a soundless, colorless flame burned bright in the heart of the city for just an instant, and then the terrible shockwave tore out from the center, scattering buildings, vehicles, people like a vengeful child tired of his playthings. A thing as great as any of them had seen on their own worlds was replaced in a moment by smoke and ruin. They saw people running to the river as their skin seared and their hair burned away. One of the off-worlders screamed. Several wept openly. I felt tears wet my own eyes as I remembered a village far away which I had never seen destroyed from orbit.

"The atom bomb," I said quietly into the now silent room, "Our people spent decades with thousands of these weapons pointed at each other, an eyeblink away from extinction. We still have them, are still working to settle differences widened by the blood of innocents even as we face alien races far older and far more advanced than we are. I am told that some of you know how easily that can begin." Nola looked back at me defiantly. Baden refused to take his eyes off of the floor, "But know this: as far more powerful as we are over you, the Wraith are that much more powerful still. If we don't stand together against the Wraith and against other enemies just as nightmarish, all humans everywhere may be reduced to slavery and cattle. That is why we brought you all here, not to toy with your lives as the 'Ancestors' did, but to meet you as equals, to teach... and to learn."

"Dr. Weir does not think we should be doing this," said Nola quietly.

"No, she does not. She believes we have already made too many mistakes where you are concerned, that if we teach you too much, too quickly, you will destroy yourselves like we almost did, like you almost did. The IOA... thinks differently, and so do I. At least, I believe you deserved the knowledge of what the consoles were and the choice of whether to go back to your worlds in peace, to be left alone— by us— or to join us in fighting. It _is_ your choice."

"Now, you have enough to think about for the moment." said Dr. Weir, entering the room, "A lunch has been prepared and, at least today, we will feast in your honor. Many of you have brought samples of food from your homeworld to share and we have recently brought food from Earth. It is not the best of what Earth has to offer, I am afraid, but we are a long way from home and what we bring cannot be fresh. That is one of the things which each of you has to offer the people of the City of the Ancestors."

I looked at Dr. Weir across the crowd and nodded, handing off responsibility for the off-worlders. When I thought everyone had gone, I closed my eyes, leaning back against the wall, and slowly sank to the floor. A wave of foreign images paraded through my head: places I had never seen, people I had never met. The most disturbing were the unbidden smells, the acrid smell of fresh tunnels, of hot alien spices, of stale shipboard air.

"Mr. Higgs?" a female voice said kindly but insistantly at my ear, "I think you've been avoiding your appointment."

"Well, the nerve regeneration is proceeding faster than even I would have thought, but you are not well yet," Dr. Keller said as she went over the recent scans on a datapad, "I noticed you've stopped using the crutch."

I nodded, "I still have trouble with balance and have been keeping the cane handy, but I've been getting stronger every day."

"Is it still... quiet?" she asked, hesitantly.

"Mostly," I nodded again, "I've been having strange dreams and flashes of odd memories. I know something is there that doesn't... belong... but it, _he_, stays under the surface."

"That will probably continue until most of the damage has been restored. But I've only seen one case like yours and I have no idea what _normal_ even is. I want you in here _every_ day."

"Yes, ma'am." I said meekly, hoping that if I went along she'd let me go back to my work, "Have you gone over the samples left by Dr. Carson?"

"_Dr. Becket_, yes," she said, allowing the change in subject, "Three of them are still in the morgue and they all support the conclusions we came to on the Odyssey. It's odd, though, I've always focused on saving lives, not on finding the best way to end them."

"Even Wraith?" I asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Even Wraith," she replied firmly, "I can't help think that there are real people in there somewhere, like that one Dr. Becket's retrovirus was used on."

"Michael Kenmore? Yeah, but he still turned out to be a monster in the end..." I broke off, realizing there were people, Colonel Caldwell in particular, who would now say the same about me.

I looked up to find Dr. Keller looking at me hard, as if she had followed my unspoken thoughts.

"A lot of us have had to do things lately we never could have imagined," she said, "I added some notes from the cadavers. Go finish your report," she stood up and began looking for her next task, then stopped and put her hand briefly on my shoulder, "But I want you back in here tomorrow."

I nodded and escaped while I could.

Nine of us sat around the conference table underneath the Gateroom. Doctor McKay and Ronon were clearly bored, Colonel Caldwell oozed barely controlled hostillity, and Doctor Keller was uncomfortable and fidgetted restlessly.

"So, bigger bullets make bigger holes? A little surprising, isn't it?" Dr. McKay said as he tossed several pictures of ballistic gelatin tests onto the table.

"It's not the size of the hole that matters, precisely, but the size of the 'permanent cavity', the volume of destroyed tissue. Our data shows that Wraith heal very quickly from penetrating wounds but that it takes longer for them to recover from tissue which is actually ruptured— sometimes days longer." Dr. Keller responded.

"Right," I said, looking to Colonel Shepherd for support, "The P-90's smaller 5.7x28mm bullets actually do better in this respect than the 9mm ball in your sidearms because they tumble, but larger calibers with hollow points or big, slow slugs do even better."

"As long as they get through the Wraith body armor," Shepherd put in, "The P-90 has done a real good job of that. The 9 mm parabellum has barely slowed them down."

"On Sateda, we used triple-barrel shotguns, 2-3 slugs per Wraith," Ronon interjected.

Colonel Caldwell actually joined the conversation at this point, "Dr. Keller and Mr. Higgs put together a list of calibers and specific bullets which should both penetrate the Wraith armor and produce the kinds of wounds they can't readily recover from. It's actually very similar to changes being made in the Milky Way for fighting Jaffa."

"OK, so we start mixing heavy weapons in both outgoing teams and city defense teams. What's the problem?" Dr. Weir asked, leaning on the table. I was struck again by her unconventional beauty and the forcefullness of her personality, especially her devastating use of _the eyebrow_.

"The US Air Force— or any other military— has a hard time ordering large amounts of hollow point ammunition without drawing _unwanted attention_," I said.

"The Geneva Convention." Weir said, leaning back, "Wraith aren't exactly signatory to the convention, but we can't really tell the public why we want some very unusual munitions. Can we make them here?"

"Sure," said Dr. Zelenka, "We can use the city's fabrication facility to produce ammunition of any type given enough raw metals and nitrogen feedstocks, but the power use would be..."

"Astronomical," Dr. McKay cut in, "Especially at the rate John Wayne here uses ammunition." McKay ducked as a wad of paper bounced off his head.

"Right," I said, "which is why the IOA thinks it would be better to use the fabrication facility to make dies and equipment and set up an offsite factory to make the ammunition in a more conventional manner."

"And where do they propose we do that?" Dr. Weir asked.

"On one of the Game worlds," said Caldwell quietly.

"We already have enough problems with the Genii, aren't we just risking exposing more technology for them to steal? Their firearms are nowhere near as good as ours," Shepherd asked.

Rodney's face lit up, "Not on the Game worlds. Every single one of them has a _space gate_."

"So we're the only ones who can access those worlds, aside from the Wraith," Zelenka said wryly, "and I don't think we're too worried about the Wraith gaining projectile weapons."

"Ronon, Teyla, what do you think?" Dr. Weir asked.

"I like big guns," Ronon shrugged.

"I think that our new allies would value something useful to do against the Wraith. Many of them have experienced cullings since the Ancestors abandoned them," said Teyla.

"All right," said Weir, "I'll consider it. What is this other research from the Milky Way?"

"Dr. Daniel Jackson of the SGC..." I started.

"I've met him," said Weir.

"He's been doing research on human Vampire legends to see if it turns up any other substantial weaknesses of the Wraith. The 'Lanteans returned to the Milky Way, and some of their stories may have ended up in Taur'i culture."

"What, we should start carrying garlic?" McKay cracked.

"We've tried that," countered Dr. Keller, "Wraith tissue samples didn't respond to garlic, but live Wraith might react to salt water sprayed in the face or eyes, like the Iratus bug that was attached to..."

"Me," said Shepherd, "Pardon me if I don't want to carry a Super Soaker into combat. What about stakes through the heart and that sort of thing?"

"That, actually works," Dr Keller said, "At least it keeps them from regenerating as long as you don't take it out. So would chopping off their head and a number of..." she grimaced, "more gruesome things people do in stories."

"So you think there actually might be significant information in Bram Stoker?" asked Weir.

"Dr. Jackson does, yes," I said, and added, "Your people held onto significant information about the Goa'uld and the Asgard for thousands of years." The words just came out that way. I knew it was a mistake as soon as I said it, with both Caldwell and Weir looking at me strangely.

"Well," said Weir, cocking the eyebrow again, "I think that's what we had on the Agenda. Dr. Zelenka, I want a report on your jumper modifications later today."

I met Caldwell's eyes briefly and fled the conference room as quickly as I could in a dignified manner. It suddenly seemed much too crowded in my head.

"Make a hole!" I said as I came up on a group of scientists clustered near one of the common rooms. They quickly swirled apart as I jogged on and down toward the North Pier. I should have been elated: it had been years since I had been able to _run_. I tried to get caught up in the pace, to just get lost in the _thump_, _thump_ of my sneakers on whatever it was the Ancients had used for flooring, to absorb the sea breeze, and smell of, what? Lavendar? that the Ancients seemed fond of, but layers of thoughts and memories swirled and clamored for attention.

I thought of time in North Carolina learning Forensics and spending every spare moment in the woods or weekends out at Kittyhawk on the coast. Images of the Duke Forest preserve with its hard pack paths, rocky outcrops, and bubbling creeks, the spicy scent of St. John's Wort and thick, sweet smell of honeysuckle. A village with grass huts arrayed around a field with tall, deep-blue flowers, the smell of evening fires and smoking meat... _no, that wasn't right_. I shook my head to clear it and turned into another corridor.

Tenessee working under a prominent Forensics professor, trips to South America to assist an archaeologist studying remains from a striking burial find, getting bitten by something in the brush, a wound that would not heal. Making love to Pythia in the trees by the lake... _no, that's not mine_. I turned too late this time and put out my hands to stop a head-long plunge into a wall. Memories fought with memories as I felt myself falling.

I held my head in my hands and let myself slide to the floor.

_You knew it would come to this. _This_ was the price. We need to work together._

I touched the tiny reliquary hanging around my neck and felt blackness rise up.


	3. Ch 2 Resistance

**Chapter 1**

**Resistance**

"Jogging? You went _jogging_? ! What were you thinking? " Doctor Jennifer Keller was livid as she looked over my chart.

"Trying not to think, actually," I said groggily. Apparently I had been found blacked out in a random corridor.

"Stay there, and don't move until I tell you to," she said, going to look at scans of my nervous system in private. I lay back against the headrest, not able to move anyway.

"Don't take it too badly," said McKay from the next bed, chewing on an energy bar, "I almost ended up here the last time I went jogging. Actually, it wasn't me really, just my body. You see, I had this gal stuck inside of me, two people in one body— you have no idea how strange that is— and she kidnapped me while I was sleeping, decided to _exercise_ in the middle of the night."

I sighed, "What are _you_ doing here, Doctor? "

"Oh," McKay said brightly, "Pressure sickness. I had to do an EVA thousands of feet under water. My hands have had tremors all day."

I turned my head and took a close look at him, widening my eyes in surprise, "I think your eyes are bulging a little, too, might be intracranial pressure."

"You really think so? I knew it! What if there's brain damage? Do you realize how critical this brain is to the success of the mission? I need to find a mirror," McKay rocketed off the bed and out of the room. I smiled to myself, scarfed the other energy bar sitting on his tray, and collapsed back into the headrest.

For a few moments, experimentally, I let the other part of me dominate. It was like sinking beneath the surface of a still pool, like I had been treading water for weeks and just let it go. But as the water closed over my head, it was very hard to control the panic. The flow of images was easier to handle but still overwhelming. I was a control freak, and I knew I was way out of my depth.

_This was a mistake_, I thought. _You would still be trapped in that wheelchair_, came the thought back.

My hand moved of its own accord, tore open the wrapper on the energy bar, a simple act, but one I had not initiated myself. As I ate the bar, I felt a firm pressure on my mind. I knew I could get back control if I wanted it, at least this time, but it, _he_, was flexing his muscles, learning how my mind and body worked like someone driving a car for the first time. _Maybe the wheelchair wasn't so bad_.

_You don't really think that_.

I didn't answer.

I was in the gym, my sidearm hung up on a peg, working through _Chu Chi Chen_, trying to let the form still the roilling surface of my mind. Move, counter-move, forward and back on the mat, imagining my partner as I broke holds, blocked strikes, used the position of my feet to protect my lower body. I remembered walking the long path by the creek, looping back to the top of a ridge, and doing forms until my calves ached, like Inigo and the Man in Black on the top of the Cliffs of Insanity.

I was relearning my own body, my moves more choppy and mechanical then they should, but still not bad for a quadriplegic. I also seemed to have another well of grace, of movement, of _experience_ I was starting to learn to draw on.

"I have never seen this discipline before," Teyla Emagen had entered the gym. Her bag sat on the floor next to her as she watched me work through the forms.

"It is called Shaolin Kung Fu, a traditional martial arts form from China on Earth. It's a bit of an eclectic art, combining grappling, boxing, kicking, and deceptive footwork. This is one of the basic practice forms, actually designed for two people. The first part goes forward," I said as I demonstrated, "and the second part goes backward, so they interlock."

"So, you were a warrior, then, like Colonel Shepherd or Major Lorne? Before your... injury? "

I shook my head, "Not exactly. I studied archaeology and forensics, a bit like Dr. Jackson, but I liked to be hands on in my approach. I learned many traditional and primitive skills to understand the people I was studying. Along the way, I learned Kung Fu and fencing— that's traditional sword fighting on Earth— before my... injury. As I'm healing and getting stronger, I'm trying to pick up what I lost along the way."

I didn't feel the need to tell her that I had also learned over a dozen distinct martial arts on several different worlds and that I still had no idea how to deal with those experiences, but I warmed to the conversation. There was something about Teyla that invited trust. When she spoke to you, you felt that she gave you her undivided attention and you had the same feeling when she listened.

"Then perhaps you would enjoy a partner? I would like to learn this 'Chu Chi Chen'."

She was an extremely good student and an effective teacher as she demonstrated a similar Athosian empty hand form. By the end of the session, she had mastered the basics of Chu Chi Chen, had started on Zong Chi Chen, a more complex form with leaps, chasing movements, and more advanced footwork. Her natural grace and reflexes were superb. I also found by the end that I had not only regained much ground but that in some ways I was faster and more fluid than I had been before. We spoke a bit as we worked, I about places I had been on Earth, she about growing up among the Athosians and with the constant threat of the Wraith. I started describing my time in South America and broke off when I didn't know how to navigate the various conversational landmines.

We spent a few minutes sparring with the Bantu sticks, where I was soundly trounced, but I was getting better. Finally, I backed off and bowed in respect, "I'm afraid that's all I can do or I'll end up in the infirmary again and I think the good doctor will have my head."

"When I first saw you in Atlantis, you were hobbling on a crutch. Now you are making me work for my hits. This is a remarkable recovery," she said, dropping the sticks into her bag. I knew she was subtley... and _politely_ fishing for information, trying to figure out who I was and my role on Atlantis.

"I was badly hurt in South America, but I also discovered some things which got me involved with the Stargate program. That opened up options for treatment most of my people never experience," it was only a small lie.

"I know Dr. Jackson's command of history made Earth's use of the Stargate possible and lead to the discovery of Atlantis, but it wasn't your skills as a scientist that got you sent here." Again, she was fishing, poking at something specific she knew or suspected.

"No, the IOA believed I had some _unique_ skills to offer."

"As a trainer of... _Guerillas_? "

The shock must have shown in my face because she waved it away and continued, "Colonel Shepherd has also done some work of that kind in a place on Earth he will not discuss. He turned the IOA down when they asked him to take charge of training the people here. He has suspected from the beginning that you were sent here in his place, that you were also military but for some reason no one wanted to admit it— perhaps because of things you have had to do in the past."

"He thought I was 'Black Ops'."

Teyla shrugged.

"Not exactly, but very perceptive just the same."

She waited, to give me a chance to say more, then shrugged again and shouldered her bag, "You keep many secrets, Mr. Higgs, and I wonder if you know all of them yourself."

"_Jason_," I said, "you can call me 'Jason'."

She turned and smiled at me on the way out, "Thank you, _Jason,_ for the workout. If you wish to talk, I believe you can find me. Among the Athosians, trust begets trust."

_And I still had some trust to earn_, went the unspoken thought.

I knew I looked like death warmed over. I had spent the entire night in long and heated conversation, working out the details of my next mission and the details, too, of an interpersonal relationship more intimate than any I had ever experienced. Hopefully I would handle it better than previous relationships, but so far I was not placing bets. I stopped to pray briefly before leaving my quarters, which itself devolved into an argument, so I was a bit frustrated by the time I got to the Mess. I crushed the edge of a plastic tray by accident but did not think anyone noticed. It was early and the tables were mostly deserted.

"_Doctor _Higgs_," _I turned at my name, noticing my mistake too late. Dr. McKay beckoned me over to his table. "Habits are hard to break," he said, "You did your dissertation at Duke University, but it's sealed, even to someone with clearance to the Stargate program."

I sat my tray down and played with its contents.

"You have no rank, no insignia," he continued, "but you are authorized to carry a sidearm, even here. Your file says you have diplomatic status, but not from whom." It was true, as a diplomat, my symbiote was entitled to a security detail and I, Jason Higgs, was it. The fact that we resided in the same body was a minor legal issue, "You were a quadriplegic less than a year ago, perhaps as recently as a month. Your medical records and scans are sealed. Dr. Keller is careful not to operate the scanner when anyone else is nearby and she clearly knows what she is dealing with, so I assume you are not a Goa'uld."

"Continue," I said.

"You're Tok'ra," he said in triumph, "part of a secret resistance to the Goa'uld, but the fact that you have a snake inside you is what drove Caldwell crazy. He was taken over by a Goa'uld not that long ago; almost destroyed Atlantis."

Checking to make sure we were, in fact, alone, I dipped into the pool and let the symbiote handle the situation, "_Continue_," I said, but my voice changed and my eyes glowed brightly for a moment.

McKay was taken aback slightly, "What? I was right? What I can't figure out is why in hell you're even here, I mean, on Atlantis... except, Oh."

I raised an eyebrow.

"Well, you're training people to resist the Wraith, just as you've been quietly training people to resist the Goa'uld for..."

"About eight hundred of your years," I said, "I am Fel-thas. I have healed this man in exchange for blending with him. It has been very hard for me to surface until now due to the extent of the damage which had to be repaired. Dr. Keller monitored my condition in transit on the _Oddesey_. The IOA believed that my identity should be kept quiet for the time being and, well, the Tok'ra..."

"Aren't usually keen to announce themselves, anyway," McKay finished for me.

I nodded deeply, the way my _Cifu_, my Kung Fu instructor, did when he was pleased with a student's answer: an odd gesture which felt completely foreign to me.

"Don't worry, your secret is safe with me, but you _so_ owe me a Power Bar."

I stood with Major Lorne in front of a large group in the town square. Teyla had made introductions for us before returning to join Colonel Shepherd for a mission. It was a perfect first test of the IOA's plan outside the isolated Game worlds. The world had escaped culling for centuries but had active trade with other worlds, so they knew just how bad things could get— and they were rapidly getting worse as Wraith awakened everywhere to find themselves short on food. They had developed good metalworking skills and a Classical (or late Medieval) level of technology. They already had written histories hidden in underground vaults, modest compared to that of the Hofans or the Genii, but still clearly thinking ahead.

I took a step forward and spoke, "Many of you have asked, 'How can we escape the cullings? ' I come here from the people of the City of the Ancestors, the people Teyla Emagen has chosen to join and fight alongside, and I come to offer help," I paused to let that sink in, "but I cannot offer you safety. Nowhere in this galaxy, in all the worlds connected by the Ancestral Rings— or indeed, even worlds not so connected— is there safety." This was met by muttering and looks from neighbor to neighbor.

"Perhaps all of you suspected as much. But we can offer you something else: the tools to fight, to protect some of your family through the time to come, the tools for your people and your _legacy_ to survive this age." At this point, I was following a script worked out by Fel-thas and I was depending on his experience that I would be able to keep their attention and eventually get their agreement. Once more I paused, and waited for the reaction.

As if on cue, someone spoke up, "How can we fight Wraith? How can we fight Wraith magic and Darts from the sky? " Murmurs of assent flowed through the crowd.

I waved my hand drammatically to Major Lorne. A large amphora had been prepositioned nearby. The Major raised his P-90 and carefully turned it into splinters of stoneware and rushing water.

"Magic is as magic does," I said, "What the Wraith have is not magic, but _technology_, _arte_. You have skilled blacksmiths among you who can fashion good steel out of ore from the earth. Is this magic? I have seen today beautiful water clocks of cunning design. Is this magic? The Wraith have great skill and powerful devices," I turned to look over the crowd, catching as many eyes as I could, "But we are not without power ourselves, and what you do not know you may yet learn."

"You will give us these weapons of yours? " an old and grizzled man with a crossbow asked.

"Better still, I will teach you to make them for yourselves. Even the most skilled among you could not understand this," I pointed to the P-90 still in Lorne's hand, "without many years of study, but this one," I pulled a Civil War-era revolver out of a roll of oil cloth at my feet, "some of you could puzzle out, and these," I indicated a pair of muskets, a double-barreled smoothbore and a long rifle, not Earth relics but devices top-down designed for off-world resistance groups, "I am confidant I can teach your craftsmen to make." I fired each of them in turn, operating the mechanisms deliberately. "If we just gave you weapons, you would become dependent on us. What we teach you is truly yours to keep."

They were impressed, but some of them had seen Wraith and their weapons. There was still muttering centered around the old man who had spoken up earlier, "You do not need to defeat the Wraith in battle," I said, "All you need do is cost them for each culling, delay them, and distract them from your families who will be hidden elsewhere. I will teach you how to signal when the Wraith arrive, how to disappear in an eye-blink, and keep your families hidden from the eyes of the scouts. I will teach you to use superior numbers— for yes, you outnumber the Wraith in their ships— to isolate and pick off their soldiers one by one."

"And just where did you learn how to do this? " said the old man, defiantly, "Who taught you how to defeat the Wraith? "

"You are not without allies, even aside from those of the City of the Ancestors. I am not what I appear. My people are older than yours, older than the Tau'ri who occupy the ancient city. Not as old as those you know as the Ancestors, but as old as the Wraith. I have lived for over..." Fel-thas did a quick calculation, "seven hundred of your cycles and have spent most of that teaching people in villages just like yours to fight a race of monsters called the Goa'uld and their fearsome armies of Jaffa. The People of the City and people you know such as Teyla Emagen have experience fighting the Wraith. Together we can be strong."

There was still a measure of doubt. Some people were won over by my arguments, but some doubted my claims, "We are supposed to believe that a man who appears no more than twenty Cycles has lived since the last culling...? "

Slowly getting used to the process, I drew inside, not from inside, but more... shrunk into myself... for a moment to let the symbiote have full control. I felt a brief but heady rush of strength and euphoria. My eyes flashed brightly and my voice vibrated with power, "If you like, I can prove that I am not entirely human..."

People stepped back, including, briefly, Lorne, even though I had already filled him in (some) on what I had planned to do. Then Fel-thas released control back to me, more gracefully than I had yet learned, "...but I would rather prove to you that together we can _kill Wraith_," I said, back to a normal tone of voice.

It was very smoothly accomplished. The townspeople were pushed just to a point of being uncomfortable but no further. They did not entirely trust (or understand) who and what I was, but they saw with their own eyes what I was offering. Their craftspeople came forward to examine the muskets, catching the scent of spent powder, looking at the simple but elegant mechanisms. They eyed me warily, keeping their distance, but they had known and trusted Teyla, they had heard stories of the travelers who came from the City of the Ancestors, and they were ready, in a world of interconnected Stargates, to believe in worlds and beings from farther still... at least for the moment.

The old man was the captain of the town Watch, an old soldier who spent his days teaching the younger. Some of the afternoon was spent discussing tactics for attacking Wraith soldiers using pairs of humans with a long rifle and a double smoothbore between them. The old man wanted something concrete to show that I knew how to fight, not just as an individual, but as a leader of men. I gave him tactics which had been deployed time and time again by mere mortals against well-armed and trained Jaffa.

We stayed through a meal— overall a productive day— and then returned to Atlantis to find that Shepherd's team was overdue. _Michael_ was back.

Lorne turned and asked me, before he went to the control room, "If these guerilla tactics worked so well for seven, eight-hundred years, why did it take so long for resistance to build up to effective numbers? "

"In the Miky Way, the Jaffa had a tactic for villages which resisted in any way or really made avoiding selections anything more than an enjoyable sport: they destroyed it, often from orbit. We had to be very careful when and where the resistance acted."

"And here? "

"The Wraith in their overculling will wipe out whole planets anyway. There is little to lose," I shrugged. Lorne nodded and dashed to the control room and Weir to report in. I went down to one of the deactivated Ancient labs— one that had nearly ascended (or killed) Rodney McKay— to try to accomplish another part of my mission.


	4. Ch 3 Soul Asylum

Chapter 1  
>Soul Asylum<p>

As I walked through Atlantis, I worried. Actually, I downright _fretted_. Several times today I had said _I_ referring to past experiences of Fel-thas, and I had just said _we_ to Major Lorne referring to the Tok'ra. The worst part is that it had not felt unnatural. I was becoming more and more comfortable with the layers of foreign memories and more and more comfortable with the foreign presence in my mind. I did not want to be. I wanted to resent it more. I did poorly with _housemates_, let alone... whatever this was.

And now I was off on a secret Tok'ra mission without Weir's permission and expressly against her standing orders. Oh, the mission was not a complete secret. There were a few members of the IOA who knew what the Tok'ra really wanted in Pegasus, what made it worth sending me, er... one of their best operatives all this way, that is, assuming _I_ even knew the full extent of what they intended. Was it possible for Fel-thas to lie to even me? Given our relative levels of experience at this whole _blending_ thing, I suspected that it was.

I did not get any real sense that my symbiote was duplicitous. There was a level of arrogance, not the domineering megalomania of the Goa'uld, but simply the self-assurance that Fel-thas' experience of centuries vastly outweighed anything I had come up with in my one brief lifetime. There was an assumption that I should simply accept his conclusions on principle and morality, on the contemplation of the numinous, rather than an effort to achieve a shared understanding from the standpoint of equals. Fel-thas might bend here and there, but the same assumption was always the starting point for the next issue.

I had had an opportunity to speak with Carter/Selmac before their death and my rebirth. I know that Carter had regretted the politics of the fragile Tau'ri – Tok'ra alliance, but there were no misgivings about the choice to blend with Selmac in the first place. The younger Carter, too, had a rough initiation to the Tok'ra but also seemed to genuinely respect them (us?) as a race and people. General O'Neill, in a brief conversation, had minced no words.

I now knew that, though Selmac spoke no ill, there had been bad blood between the two Tok'ra. Fel-thas had been undercover on a planet seething with discontent. Selmac had been particularly affected by the attrocities committed there because of the relatives of his then host and had urged action. Fel-thas had been more cautious, fearing the reprisals of open rebellion. In the end, the humans revolted and several prosperous towns had been reduced from orbit. Fel-thas now admitted he had not been 'right'— the situation might have gone either way— but he had lost a woman he loved and there had been friction between them for many decades after as a consequence. Seeing Valla Maldaran in the SGC had also been a bittersweet reminder of both a successful uprising against the Goa'uld and near disaster for her personally. I knew that, had I examined them, my symbiote's long memories of resistance would be laced with bitterness. What use was victory if the personal cost was always too high? What good even winning the struggle againt the Goa'uld if the Tok'ra themselves became extinct?

And so, when I came down to it, I trusted the core motivations of the Tok'ra, even if, from time to time and individual to individual, things had gone astray. I knew that none of us could single-handedly heal all ills and perhaps that was a place where a mere human had an advantage: I was used to thinking of myself as a relatively small part of history and a core of faith told me that the part was neverthelesss exactly what I needed to be doing.

I still felt badly about going behind Dr. Weir's back, but that, too, was something I was used to dealing with ever since I had been recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency back in college. A student archaeologist had reason to travel to many countries with relatively little attention or suspicion. That had made me a natural fit for many small jobs and often made it necessary to hide what I was doing from my coworkers.

Finally, I stopped at the door to the lab and powered up a tablet. I accessed the Trojan Horse Dr. McKay had tripped when he tried to access my sealed records and used it to override the door code. The IOA had figured senior Atlantis personnel would not be able to resist snooping and had installed it ahead of time. The door opened silently; I entered and closed it behind me. Though I knew no one would see it, I felt more secure leaving most of the lights off. I approached the device cautiously. I did not want to accidentally activate it and I had no idea what it would do to Tok'ra physiology. Instead, I sat down at the console nearby and Fel-thas began sifting through the notes and records on human DNA manipulation we had not been able to access through the Ancient library database.

After several hours, exhausted, I gave up and left. It was clear that the 'Ascendification' device did not have the capabilities I needed, but there was a more disturbing revelation: even the Altarans never really understood how the communications stones worked— they had borrowed the technology themselves. But from whom? And how had the technology been reverse-engineered? It was clear that the communications stones worked on something much more fundamental than the level of DNA. Anubis had known something, perhaps something gleaned from the ascended Altarans. He had made a 'clone' of himself with all his memories intact, but cloning DNA by itself did not copy memories. Perhaps the Dakara 'weapon' might have contained critical information... before it was destroyed by the Ori. Ba'al inherited many of Anubis' toys and trinkets, but was not likely to help the Tok'ra; somewhere the original answer lay hidden.

I touched the reliquary at my throat on the way back up the corridor, "What we need is here, Egeria, and we'll find it," I say quietly.

It was a busy week. It started with a jumper ride to Geldar to inspect construction there. The mine on the border of Geldar and Hallona now had an entrance shaft on both sides of the river. A new annex was being excavated to shelter portions of the population and, more importantly, records, tools, and knowledge, from Wraith attack. The mine's machine shop had been greatly expanded with tools from Atlantis' fabrication facility. The first runs of ammunition were ready for shipment back to Atlantis and the local population was also manufacturing quality home-grown bolt-action rifles based on .308 Springfield cartridges they were already making for the alliance. There was still a good deal of friction between the two nations, but having a shared cause allowed them both to move forward.

Next, I returned to Lenir, my test case for the anti-Wraith resistance. Progress here was slower, but the main town was now the center for regional militia training in addition to its own watch. Pikes and crossbows were being augmented by small squads of musketeers. The jumper which had picked me up in Hallona now deposited its cargo in the town square where a marine sniper was to begin their instruction in using the twenty Geldaran rifles we had brought with us. In several days, the jumper would return to retrieve us and a cargo of a local herb which made an excellent non-addictive analgesic and sedative.

While one group of townspeople received their long-rifle instruction, I walked with several others to a rocky field just to its south. Under their watchful eye, I placed a yellowy-green crystal on the ground. After a few moments, it began pulsating and we could feel the vibration of the ground in our bones and teeth.

_It must seem like magic to you_, Fel-thas entoned in my mind.

_It does_, I responded, _but a type of magic I've seen before. My dad was a farmer, like these people here. We're used to setting things on the ground and coming back later to find a beanstalk. Maybe the Tok'ra who invented these crystals was a farmer_, I suggested.

_No_, Fel-thas replied, _his lover was the farmer. We needed a better way to make new tunnels quickly and have them be consistent from facility to facility. The metaphor of planting a seed seemed fitting. We have been planting seeds of rebellion for a very long time._

Once again, I 'remembered' a young woman by a lake, dark hair and lithe curves, gathering lillies in the sun. Then the smell of burning crofts and lillies on mounded clods of earth.

An hour later, I was adapting the ring platform to run off of a portable naqueda generator. Now I just needed the generator.

Later that evening, however, a sonic boom like far-off thunder announced the arrival of the intergalactic delivery service and I was meeting Colonel Ellis at the gangway of the Apollo. His aid checked off items on a list as they were unloaded, including the portable generator and ten pounds of US silver coins.

"What's this?" I asked, indicating a piece of equipment consisting of several interconnected tubs, motor-driven paddles, and a lot of tubing.

"A portable bio-diesel rig. Relatively portable, anyway," he said as four airmen set it down. One of them handed me a thick military-drafted manual before the Colonel continued, "Your request for an Al-Kesh was denied, both by the IOA and the Tok'ra high council."

I blinked, Fel-thas just as puzzled as I was, "And making bio-diesel will replace this... how?"

Colonel Ellis waved his hand for me to follow him up the gangway, to the lift, and finally to the starboard flight pod. Then I understood. Inside were two Dodge Ram pickup trucks, inline-six diesels with a few IOA-added bells and whistles. Finally, Ellis handed me a small pouch containing data storage crystals. These would contain any new orders and briefings from the Tok'ra high council.

"Colonel, what was that being assembled on the flight deck?" It had looked suspiciously like a MRV, a multiple warhead nuclear weapon, much larger than the X-303's usually carried.

"Not your department," Ellis answered briskly, "We're due at Atlantis with the rest of the cargo. If you have any requests for the next drop, file them with Dr. Weir as usual."

"Will do. Oh, I have something for you, actually," I said, retrieving a small wooden keg from a nearby stump, "The Lanirans make a pretty decent stout. I had heard you were a connoisseur." It had been Fel-thas' idea, actually. When running an op in remote territory, it never hurt to grease the skids a little by making good with the folks you might need to call in a hurry.

Shortly thereafter, I was cackling in mad glee as the generator-powered rings-platform lowered my new trucks into the still cooling cavern below. The locals were already moving tools, books, and crates of beets into the small complex. Even Fel-thas had never seen such an odd juxtaposition of alien technologies. Tomorrow I would take a truck for a spin to the next planet and try out the dashboard DHD.

A deer trail lead through a clearing ahead and then down to a small stream. The vegetation near the large oak had been trampled very recently, the outline of booted feet visible in grass stalks which had not yet sprung back upright. I would have preferred to have Ronan Dex here. I was a passable tracker and Fel-thas had centuries of experience, but Ronan knew Wraith. He knew what their prints looked like and he knew how their minds worked, what they would have been thinking as they stood here for a moment.

One set of prints seemed lighter than the rest. The Wraith soldiers carried more weapons and armor; they were built more solidly than the scouts or officers. It seemed likely that the group's leader had stood here, next to the oak, and looked down the trail. Two Wraith soldiers stood protectively nearby and three more (four?) took up positions on the trail to watch for enemies. Enemies— something the Wraith were not used to encountering on routine culling expeditions. The leader had turned in place, creating a scuff mark in the softer dirt by the tree, then they had gone on their way down the trail and into the clearing.

I looked at Orin, one of the local militia recruits. I mimed the Wraith going down the trail to the stream. Then I mimed us going off trail and cutting them off where it looped back. He nodded and pointed past the tree to where an older track ran. I gestured for him to take point and for the team to expect enemy contact. We had done small unit training in this exact area a few days before, but Orin still knew the land, every root and bramble, better than I did. He quickly checked the primers and safety on his double-musket and proceded softly into the brush. There was tension in the set of everyone's features, a tightening of the grip on their rifles, but also excitement and anticipation that they would soon be able to prove themselves and put paid to the invaders of their homes, if only a handful.

The day was stifling hot, the forest air was still and close. No birds or animals made noise, already driven off by the intrusion of the Wraith. Mosquitos whined around us, sucking in small quantities what the Wraith would drain in full. We passed soundlessly through low ferns and more slowly through a patch of bramble, over the crest of a small hump of decaying trunks of trees fallen long ago. One of the men kicked loose a rock and I put up my fist for 'freeze' as it skittered into thorny cramble-berries. Fel-thas heightened my senses, as I knew my enemies' were heightened. I strained to hear any sound or movement. A crow called a short distance off, possibly disturbed by Wraith on the loop of the trail.

After a moment, I lowered my hand and signalled to proceed, Orin and three others ahead of me, three more men behind. Shortly, Orin signalled with his arm across his chest that the lower loop of the trail was just ahead and I could barely hear the sound of water from the stream beyond that. We fanned out and took up hasty positions, crouching behind what cover could be found. Then we waited, but not long.

The Wraith came down the trail, looking and aware, but confident. There were just five soldiers with the leader, but there was a _complication_. One of the soldiers lead a man roughly with a pointed stunner. The Wraith had arrived through the stargate and headed to the small village for a snack only to find it empty and deserted. Puzzled, they had begun searching the surrounding area as we hoped they would. They must have caught a villager coming or going who had not been able to get to safety. They had not fed on him yet presumably because they wanted information first.

Orin looked at me questioningly. I shrugged and raised my .40 S&W, silently clicking off the safety. We would have to risk the assault while we had the chance, especially if they had a prisoner who might tell the Wraith what we were up to.

I put up three fingers with my support hand, then two, then back to the handgun as I silently counted 'one'. The clatter of muskets shattered the silence, a first volley, then a second. The leader and three soldiers went down quickly, one was wounded and one had escaped harm. One of my men was down from a stunner blast. I fired the last two rounds from my magazine at the uninjured Wraith, striking him in the chest, and yelled, "Charge!" as my musketeers reversed their heavy rifles and took to the path. Another of my men dropped to a stunner and then it was hand-to-hand. I wheeled the reloaded handgun back and forth, looking for an opportunity. A third man went flying from a Wraith soldier's blow and crumpled against a tree. The Wraith was cracked in the forehead by the butt of a rifle and briefly went down under a flurry of blows. It was just long enough: I had a good target and a clean background to put two rounds into its head.

The other Wraith was also down, Orin hitting it repeatedly to make sure it stayed that way. I walked over, administered a single bullet, then looked for the prisoner, an older gentlemen as it turned out, too old for the militia who had been walking back from the stream with a couple of fish when the alarm had sounded. He had dropped to the ground and rolled into the brush when the first shots were fired. Afterwards, his voice cracked a bit as he told me what had happened. Old he may be, but steady and canny. People who grew up under the constant threat of the Wraith tended to be a bit more adaptable or a bit more dead before they got to his age.

"Two stunned, sir, and Bekin is a bit beat up; I think his collarbone and some ribs," Orin grinned at me, handing me my spent mag, his brother walking around to check the bodies and collect equipment.

"Well done," Fel-thas said, "Drag those two onto the path until they wake up and watch the perimiter in case there are more of them somewhere."

Two weeks had gone by since my last contact with Atlantis. The address would not lock. Without a jumper, I could not get to any of the Game planets to use their consoles and satellite network to communicate. Midway Station's stargate was protected by its macro from being dialed except by Atlantis and the SGC. I was cut off until someone contacted me or sent a ship. Fel-thas was concerned but sanguine— this had apparently happened to him many times before. I was frantic. Had Atlantis been attacked? Perhaps destroyed? The thought of spending the rest of my life (however long or short) as a guerilla without access to decent coffee and Terry Pratchet novels frankly terrified me.

We cleaned up our mess, splinted Belkin as best we could and, when the other two woke up, went back to the village to give the 'All-Clear." Later, the bodies would be collected and burned. Our plan had worked and the villagers-turned-monster-hunters were doing very well, but once the Wraith we killed went missing, someone might come looking for them. We had to be prepared for a heavier incursion.

I radioed to the marine at the stargate to try the dialing sequence again: still no lock. Putting on a face more appropriate to victory, I walked to the square where the people were already assembling.

That night, I was going through the remainder of the updates from the Tok'ra High Council and found this note:

Colonel Everett of the Tau'ri Marine Corp, victim of a Wraith attack, died yesterday at a Tok'ra facility despite our efforts to heal his injuries. We believe that a symbiote can provide no protection against a Wraith feeding. Even small amounts of Wraith enzyme appear to inhibit activity of a symbiote and it is being considered for use in Goa'uld extraction ceremonies. More experimental data required for solid conclusions.

I hefted a tankard of warm Lanirian stout, "Here's to _not_ getting more _experimental data."_


	5. Ch 4 Leadership

Chapter 1  
>Leadership<p>

I hobbled into Dr. Weir's office, noting the recent repairs. The Atlantis engineers had been careful matching materials, but a good eye could still pick out the patches of high-tech spackle. A partially-filled basket of fruit sat on a table by the door, the hand-woven reed basket typical of one of the Game Worlds. A stack of personnel folders sat next to it, topped by a tray of half-eaten lunch. Colonel Samantha Carter looked up as I came in.

Her eyes narrowed as she took me in, the cuts and burns my symbiote had only started to heal, "Dr. Higgs, you look like hell."

"The Wraith found one of our bolt-holes. They softened us up with an orbital bombardment and then went in with ground troops to mop up. We had just about had it when the damndest thing happened: the Wraith motherships were destroyed from orbit. After a week's solid fighting, we managed to get rid of the last of them on the ground, but the butcher's bill was high. Very high."

"The replicators," she pullled over a chair and gestured for me to sit down, "They destroyed the hive ships."

"That's my guess," I said, gingerly lowering myself into the chair, "but we only had the most rudimentary sensors installed. Dr. Weir may have saved the entire _End Game_ strategy."

"We all owe her a great deal," she murmurred, her blue eyes grave and thoughtful for a moment, "I'm sorry we left you out of contact for so long."

"You had other priorities, and we knew the risks when we accepted the mission. Congratulations, by the way," I gestured to the eagle on her uniform and to the office, blinking for a moment at the photo of Sam Carter on a motorcycle which lay haphazzardly on one end of the desk.

She crossed behind the desk and sat down herself, steepling her hands and fixing me with a steely gaze, "Speaking of which, I was not happy about the decision to keep Dr. Weir out of the loop regarding... the full scope of Tok'ra activities in Pegasus."

My voice changed as Fel-Thas took fore, "Perhaps, Colonel Carter, but because of that secrecy, the replicators are now not fully apprised of those activities."

"Do you believe your activities are of any interest to the Replicators?"

"An interesting question," I said with a half-nod, "but 'a secret shared only by the enemy is not a secret'."

It was her turn to acknowledge a point, "Martouf was fond of that saying. But be that as it may, I do know your secondary objectives. Have you made progress with the Ascension Device?"

"No, a human's memories are somehow stored or linked on a cellular level in a manner accessible to certain Altaran devices..."

"Such as the communication stones," she interrupted.

"Precisely, but we are no closer to learning how that is accomplished. The Altarans seemed to have borrowed the technology from an even older race of beings."

She raised her eyebrows at that, "But the Goa'uld... and Tok'ra... themselves have an ability to pass memories genetically, do they not?"

"We do, under certain circumstances, but we believe that our biology simply takes advantage of a trait humans already possess, not accessible to them consciously, but implanted in them by the Dhakharra device."

"To what end?"

"We believe that it made it easier for the Altarans to monitor the progress of experiments in human evolution."

"And that you can exploit that ability to recover Tok'ra shared-knowledge from the fragment of Egeria you keep in that reliquary?"

"Recover, and replicate that knowledge in new Tok'ra symbiotes," I said.

She stood up as she digested that information, walking over to the fruit basket, ignoring the 'Salisbury steak' on the tray, and selecting a green fruit resembling a papaya. She offered me one as well, which was politely declined. She perched on the edge of her desk, brow furrowed, a crease at the corner of her mouth as she turned the fruit in her hand, "The Tok'ra believe we made a mistake in the Milky Way."

We had not exactly been silent on that topic, so I saw no need to respond.

"The Tok'ra believe that we created the Lucian Alliance by disrupting Goa'uld hegemony without planning for the future. Many of the human worlds, including ones we freed, had no choice but to turn to the organized crime syndicates for trade and security."

"That is a fair summary of the Tok'ra position," Fel-Thas said, "In Pegasus, the Tau'ri have an opportunity to not repeat that mistake. The IOA and the Tok'ra believe stable— proactive— alliance-building in Pegasus can provide a foothold to counter-balance the Lucian Alliance in the Milky Way, something of benefit to all concerned."

"I agree," Sam Carter's eye's flashed mischieviously, "which is why I suggested that approach to Anise. I knew the IOA wouldn't take the idea coming from me."

It was my turn to be taken aback for a moment. Finally, Fel-Thas nodded deeply, acknowledging the point, "Martouf had said that you were a formidable personality. I believed his partiality to Jolinar clouded his judgement. Clearly, I was mistaken. You would have made a good host to her..." I smiled wryly, "though perhaps the galaxy is safer without such a pairing."

"What is your next step?"

"I plan to install cloaking technology in several of the Alliance bolt-holes to better protect them from attack, increase the number of safe havens to minimize the risk of losing one, and encourage limited offensive operations to hurt the Wraith while they are distracted by the Replicators. I have also found several resource-rich sites which might make Pegasus operations more self-reliant."

"And toward the other objective?"

"I thought I would have tea with Athar," I said simply and worked my way to my feet, "I am officially a diplomat."

She seemed to try that one on for a moment and then shrugged, "Please give her my regards, and inform her of the loss of Dr. Weir." She gestured in dismissal, and then, as I turned toward the door, she stopped me with a hand on my shoulder, "Jason, how are _you_ doing?"

I considered this carefully and finally matched her shrug, "Shaken, but I'll do. I think. Your... frankness helped me a lot to make my decision, and I don't regret it. Yet."

On the way from Colonel Carter's office, I stopped by the infirmary, both to be clucked at by Dr. Keller and to pick up the syringe with the ATA retrovirus which had been set aside for me. While Dr. Keller was distracted, I palmed a second syringe, this one with the Hoffan drug. Fel-Thas was confidant that he could control the drug's side-effects and that it would provide at least some protection from the Wraith. I then went back to my quarters, slept for ten hours to let my symbiote continue to heal my wounds, and then injected myself with the drug.

I was at one of the consoles in the "Game Room" when Colonel Shepherd came by. I had already been there an hour longer than I intended. It was very hard not to get caught up in the elegance and raw power of the subspace satellite network. I had lost a good bit of time in college to Sim City 2000 and Microprose could not hold a candle to the Ancients' programmers. Following Dr. Zelenka's notes, I had managed to unlock a higher level to the system, able to flip through resource and production statistics across multiple worlds, reuse patterns and designs, and even fiddle with the Altaran equivalent of Gantt charts, coordinating manufacturing runs on one world according to resource constraints on another. The only thing I really could not do was actually _move_ the items from one world to another, which is why I had requested the Al Kesh.

Lt. Col. Shepherd chimed the door. I shut down the console and went to answer it. "Sorry, Dr. Weir's standing orders," he said.

"I'm sorry?" I asked, confused.

"Dr. McKay, Major Lorne, Dr. Zelenka and I aren't allowed in this room and Colonel Carter decided not to change the order. Can't say I blame her: Dr. McKay can get a little carried away at times."

"I was just finishing here, anyway," I said, stepping into the hall, "What can I do for you, Colonel?"

We walked a short distance to a nearby sun-lit alcove with a couple of short benches, a mummified tree in a pot, and a few well-worn copies of Reader's Digest.

"Well, first of all, I want to apologize for leaving you folks stranded out there so long," he said.

"I have already told Colonel Carter that I... er... we don't blame you for that— you had your hands full," I said.

Shepherd shuffled his feet uncomfortably, "Still, I... it's a bit personal to me that we don't leave people behind. I've sortof been there before."

"Tayla told me you worked some black ops back on Earth before you joined the Stargate Program. She also told me you turned down the job they offered me."

"Well, yeah. Don't get me wrong, I think that what you are doing is important, but..." he paused, and shuffled a little bit more.

"But you think you'd lose that last little bit of yourself and go over the edge if you continued doing it...?"

He stopped short and looked up at me in some surprise.

"I read one of the early mission reports out of the SGC of a black ops specialist who went all 'Apocalypse Now' and started enslaving the natives. SG-1 had to go in and take him out," I explained.

"Well, it's not like I'm afraid I'd start looking for people to worship me or something... now, Rodney maybe..."

Fel-Thas cut in briefly, and my voice changed, "Believe me, Colonel, I do understand. Everyone has to know where their own boundaries lie. In the work you are doing now, you are brought up against the rules every day, first by Dr. Weir, and now by Samantha Carter. You are surrounded by people who remind you of your duty. Out there..." my arm gestured out the window to the ocean and beyond, "it can be hard to keep your perspective. I have a great deal of respect for your decision: _A warrior without restraint is a danger only to himself._"

"What does it feel like when you do that whole glowy-eye thing?"

"Have you had breakfast?"


	6. Ch 5 Blind Men

Chapter 1  
>Blind Men<p>

After a sizable breakfast at the Mess, I signed out one of the Nintendo Game Cubes(tm) from the Rec Room and spent the next two hours playing Super Mario Smash Brothers(tm). It took a bit of work to play with one controller in each hand but it was a useful exercise, learning to focus on different tasks and even, in this case, competing against each other. It was one of the skills which made the Tok'ra fearsome fighting against multiple opponents, and it was a combat form that the Goa'uld, needing to constantly dominate their hosts, could not match. Pikatchu had just knocked Donkey Kong off a cliff-face in one of my few victories against my symbiote when the door chimed.

A female Air Force officer entered, a bit puzzled at seeing the game running, the two controllers, and a bowl of popcorn. She glanced around the room as if expecting my hidden guest to spring at her from behind a Coptic Christian wall hanging. "Am I interrupting something?" she asked with a cocked eyebrow.

"No, I was just playing with myself," I said, and then back-pedalled, "Let's pretend I didn't say that. What can I do for you, Lieutenant?"

"I'm Lieutenant Hailey, sir. I'm to go with you off-world to see 'that Ancient chick of Colonel Shepherd's' — Dr. McKay's words, sir— and you're supposed to fill me in on my permanent assignment."

"Dr. McKay sent you to me?"

"He gave me the message. I guess he was upset that I was being pulled from his team just after I got here. Actually, I'm a little confused myself: I've developed expertise in wormhole physics, and I'm not sure I'm going to be useful running Guerilla ops in the bush."

"Oh, we'll make use of you, Lieutenant. I need someone to work on interfacing Ancient, Wraith, and Goa'uld technology as well as helping train some of the natives to use it. But first, Athar."

A cool breeze blew across the rocky grotto at the base of Athar's temple. The clear, late fall air afforded a view of a wide, grassy valley bellow. One of Athar's acolytes brought a tray of tea and dismissed himself, leaving Lt. Hailey and I with the 'high priestess'.

"I am sorry to learn of the loss of Dr. Weir," she said, sipping at the hot tea, "she was a capable leader." I took a moment to sip myself, the fruity aroma reminding me strongly of chamomile: did the 'Lantean's drink pineapple weed? Athar continued, "but that is not why you are here."

"I came to ask you some questions about the origins of my people, and yours," I said.

"Your people? Does Lieutenant Hailey understand what you are?" Athar asked, innocently.

"I know he is a Tok'Ra," Hailey said, "and I have met them before."

"But does she really understand what that means? For that matter, does your host?"

In that moment, I was literally beside myself. Another me appeared, sitting in another chair, also sipping tea, but his eyes glowed, not the incandescent glow of the symbiote, but the red glare of something from darker dreams. "There, now we can all talk."

I had a sudden flood of images through my link with the symbiote: dark images of war, depravity, and torture, of slavery, betrayal, and rapine spanning centuries across most of a galaxy. "What is this?" I gasped, reeling.

"It is the memories of the Goa'uld, Egeria's heritage carried within you by your 'symbiote.' It is an inescapable part of what it means to be a Tok'Ra," Athar said quietly, sipping her tea.

"You hid this from me?" I asked Fel-Thas.

The other me spoke, shrugging apologetically, "I hide them from myself. We all do, from the moment of our birth. Before we take our first host, we learn to supress the Goa'uld memories, searching them sparingly and only at need in our fight against the Goa'uld lest they twist even us with their depravity. But every one of us is only a few thoughts away from any reminder we might need as to why we fight and why Egeria turned away from the others."

"But those memories... they contain... enjoyment, pleasure, _glee_ at misery and suffering."

"Yes, they do," Fel-Thas answered gravely.

"And you have been tempted by them yourself, haven't you?" If Athar said it, she echoed my thoughts exactly.

Fel-Thas turned and fixed his eyes squarely on mine, "Yes, Jason Higgs. I have had to search through those memories several times over the course of my life, over the lives of many hosts, looking for information to support our cause. I cannot examine the knowledge and not sense the emotions behind them, not sense that acts of depravity felt good, the _ecstasy_ and intensity of causing pain to another, the thrill of power. None of us can. Egeria's training, the iron discipline we learn, is the only thing which keeps the darkness at bay. We are all a lapse of will or a use of the sarcophagus away from _the Pit_," and then accusingly to Athar, "Why do you bring up this thing? Why disturb that which sleeps?"

"Because you seek to disturb things which now sleep, and your host deserves to know the whole of it."

Alter-me was silent for several moments, holding his cup in both hands and staring at his feet, "We are not proud of what we come from," he whispered finally, "but we are proud of what we are, or, perhaps, of what we choose to be, despite that which we are."

Athar sat back in the chair and smiled, "Well-spoken, child of Egeria. Ask me what you will."

"You will tell us what we need to know?" I asked.

"I did not say that," she said, "and I am still bound by our laws to not interfere in the lower planes— a law I sit here imprisoned for having broken. But we— and I personally— do have an interest in what you have to say. I may exchange some knowledge of history and philosophy in exchange for some of your own."

"You asked Dr. Weir about religion. You wanted to know all about the beliefs which have developed on Earth since the fall of Atlantis," Fel-Thas prompted.

"Yes, Dr. Weir was most helpful. I read the holy scriptures of many cultures while I visited the City."

"But why," I asked incredulously, "would you care about religion? You have _Accension_."

"Why do you still wear the sign of the crucifix on the same chain as Egeria's reliquary?" she asked, spreading her hands, "You who have been granted the power and long life which people have worshipped in 'gods'? Has this not been a source of contention between you and this Tok'Ra?"

Now it was my turn to be silent and stare at me shoes. My skin prickled with both shame and anger remembering the arguments with my host when I insisted on praying, "Because I still believe there is something more," I said, my voice shaking slightly with emotion, "greater than ourselves, which gives meaning to our lives. I believe there is a power beyond us, beyond all of us, which has a purpose in and _through_ us."

"Well-spoken, son of A-dama," she said, gesturing to herself and taking in the unseen presence of the continuum of Alterans with a graceful gesture, "And so do we— or some of us— believe as well: as we are to mortal beings, so may some Other or Others be to ourselves. But what of your Holy Scripture? Can you still hold to it in the light of all you have seen and experienced? Can you still think that the universe cares for 'Love'?"

"I do not believe we were ever meant to understand Scripture in that way, as a literal and clear interpretation of past events. Rather, it was meant as a guidepost for living and as..." I grasped for words, "...a sign that we are not _alone_. In any case, the Christian Messiah is one that I choose to serve in my life and to emulate in my thoughts to the extent that I can. It is not just the Tok'ra who are at odds with themselves, one step away from darkness. I have seen and experienced things in my life which I cannot understand, but which I hope someday will make sense."

"So is 'God' then to be just a placeholder for what we don't yet know? A God of Empty Spaces, ever shrinking from the grasp of Science?" Fel-Thas dismissed my arguments with a wave of my-his-the hand.

"No, you know I don't think that. But science can only answer the How. It cannot tell us Why or tell us whether to be men or monsters with what we know."

Once again, Fel-Thas waved dismissively and turned back to Athar, "But you have not told us what interest you have in any of this. What do the beliefs of billions of superstitious humans, or of this superstitious human, mean to ascended beings? And what does this have to do with..." he paused for a moment, with that universal look of the hard-drive busy light on his face, "Ah... The Ones-Who-Came-Before, the Ancient _Ancients_. The transference and storage of memory you learned to manipulate but which was already there in the first evolution of human-kind. That is what this is about, isn't it? There is a legend among Tok'Ra, just a fragment of a myth, of some Ancients who believed in and pursued a special _destiny_."

She turned her palm up, sweeping her index finger in a gracefull arc, "We all either seek truth or hide from it. There is no middle ground. Our beliefs have often put us at odds with the others. Our belief in a higher law means we often break the laws of our own kind and are punished for it. Yes, we discovered the retention of memory, the Well of Souls, as your fragmented myths call it. When we recreated humans in the Milky Way through the Dhakarra device, we replicated its mechanisms for our own purposes. We built technology to manipulate it, and that eventually led to... other things."

"How did you discover the Well of Souls?" I asked, "What lead you to suspect that such a thing was possible?"

"Shortly after our taming of our own solar system— shortly at least, in the span of our own history and memory— we found a naked singularity, an astronomical curiosity which we soon determined to be artificial."

"I'm sorry, a what?"

"A naked singularity," Fel-Thas entoned in his teacher's voice, "is a 'black hole' which rotates so quickly that its event horizon becomes a torus, exposing a window through its center, a hole-within-a-hole and warping space time around it. We have suspected for some time that such a singularity might have been the basis— or perhaps the template— of stargate technology. But how does this answer Jason's question?"

"Really, Fel-Thas, for a being so long-lived, you race is most impatient." Very deliberately, she poured herself another cup of tea, then sat back, "Once we realized that the singularity was artificial, we had to reevaluate everything we believed. This sowed the seeds for a deep split in our society, one which eventually lead to us and the Ori. But more important to _this_ story is that we discovered _information_ attached to the singularity at a level we still do not understand. With what we learned from that device, we began noticing information, structure, _purpose_ everywhere we looked, like the bar-codes attached to everything the Tau'ri brought to the City. We found these on stars, on planets, even inside ourselves. When we went to another galaxy, fleeing from the Ori, we found more of them, scattered here and there, like pins stuck in a map. Like the Tau'ri bar codes, they don't make any sense without knowing the catalog behind them. But they meant something to someone or something, and some of them were encoded on such a fundamental level, that they hinted at understanding beyond..."

"Beyond the Universe itself," I finished for her.

"The memories are not stored in the DNA, are they?" Fel-Thas asked.

"You already know the answer to that question," she shrugged.

"Who then created the Goa'uld?" he pressed.

"You know the answer to that as well. You have seen the planet where the symbiotes developed. You still have legends of the First Ones, the hosts you enslaved before Ra discovered humans."

"All life in the galaxy was destroyed when the Altarans left it for Pegasus. The device left behind restarted and repopulated the stars in the Milky Way. You designed the Goa'uld as another of your experiments, gave them the ability to manipulate 'genetic' memory and set them loose on the galaxy."

Athar said nothing.

"The fragment of Egeria does not _contain_ the data. It is just a tag, a label pointing to data stored _somewhere else_," I said.

On the jumper ride back, Lieutenant Hailey glanced over at me in the co-pilot's seat, "I'm sorry you did not get any answers to your questions."

"What?" I looked up, confused. Fel-thas then 'replayed' for me the memory of our conversation with the Alteran as our senses recorded: what an outsider would have experienced. What would another Ancient have seen transpire in that rocky grotto?

"Don't be too grateful yet," Fel-thas spoke in my mind, "She only gave us that much because she knows we don't have what we need to do anything with it. Yet."

What bothered me more, and what I knew Fel-Thas was masticating beneath the surface of his dark pool, was that the Ancients had created his people, perhaps with complete intention, perhaps partly by accident as they did the Wraith, and all but a few of them did nothing to amend their wrongs or alleviate the suffering of many millions of beings. In some very significant sense, the Ancients were directly responsible for every horror in his— our— memory, and yet the Ancients, their internal struggles, their forgotten technology were still the best hope for saving many.

"So?" said Carter, her head buried in a data tablet for a moment. Then she swiped her hand across it, locking the screen, pushed it back, and looked up at me.

I set a steaming cup of tea down on her desk. "A species of _Matricaria_, a relative of chamomile that is grown by Athar's people. I also brought some seeds back for the Botany lab."

"OK..." she said doubtfully, but she politely sipped at it. Her eyes lit up, "That's not bad, actually. Anything more substantive?"

"Do we still have access to the Ori supergate in the Milky Way?"

"Well, it hasn't been destroyed yet," she said, "Why?"

"There is a naked singularity in the galactic vicinity of the Alteran/Ori homeworld."

She digested this for a moment, sipping at her tea, "The original inspiration for the stargates?"

I nodded.

"I'll see if we can get someone to take a look."

As I walked down the stairs from the tower, newly-healed muscle and bone still stiff, I had another internal conversation, "You're still determined not to tell Carter what we learned about the Goa'uld and the _Well_?"

"Yes."

"Why not?"

"I will not tell the Tau'ri before I can report to the Tok'ra High Council, but also because there is something Athar chose _not_ to tell us, and I am waiting for the 'other shoe to fall'."


	7. Ch 6 Burned Feathers

Chapter 6  
>Burned Feathers<p>

"Mr. Higgs? Can you come look at this for a moment?"

Lieutenant Hailey was sitting at the game console with its debugging mode activated, painstakingly working her way through line after line of the 'Lantean sourcecode which controlled the vast subspace network it operated. I leaned over her shoulder and scanned the glowing Ancient symbols. I could make little sense of most of it, even the Tok'ra within me was no programmer, but I could see enough Ancient words in the code to understand that I was looking at instructions for tracking human projects on the Game Worlds and reporting progress to the consoles. There was an elegant flow and symmetry to the program which made it look like poetry, though more like Lewis Carol or e. e. cummings than Dylan.

"You told me to pay special attention to subprograms for workflow and fulfillment, to figure out how the consoles track materials and items through their evolutions in the Game?"

I nodded.

"The consoles have an amazing ability to figure out... no, not to 'figure out' but to just 'know' exactly which materials went into which outputs, where they came from, who handled them and so on. The whole thing puts Fed Ex to shame. Well, anyway, I'm not a lot closer to understanding how it works, but it keeps coming back to a set of external subroutines..." She highlighted a specific symbol in the text and then activated it. Immediately, a multidimensional contextual help flowed onto the screen and she selected information on the author of the symbol, "Janus:" she said, "he wrote every single one of the routines in this section of the program. Isn't he the one in Dr. Weir's report, the one who was reprimanded for building the time machine?"

Again, I nodded, "I believe he was, but how does that help us?"

"Look at this:" Hailey indicated a set of symbols on the 'author' page and sounded it out in Alteran, "'Icarii,' but the database link is locked. I can't open it. It is connected to several of the other Ancients who wrote portions of the Game, and I can't reach anything from their records either. But, doing a separate search, I found something else."

She brought one of the background displays forward and I scanned the Ancient text quickly, then stood up and thought for a moment. There were two— at least two— factions of Alterans here in Atlantis before the war with the Wraith, the Icarii and the Dedalii. Janus was one of the Icarii, and had philosophical differences with the others. We already knew that he was punished for the stunt with the time machine and that he was forced to destroy some of his work. This entry suggested that there were other Icarii who thought like Janus and who were also punished, more than once, and that much of their work had been hidden or destroyed by the Alteran council. This 'Game Room', in particular, had been closed off several years before the Atlanteans lost their fight with the Wraith and left for the Milky Way. Like Janus, some of the Icarii probably continued to work on their projects in secret.

"So if we can find remains of the Icarii's labs and notes, we may be able to better understand how this system works," I said, "but how can we get into the locked database entry?"

"Well, first off, I think we know more about these factions than we think. Look at these words." She rearranged the text to put the two faction names next to each other in their rough transliterations: Icarrii, Dedalii. "Think like a human, not a Tok'Ra," she suggested.

"The two brothers, Icarus and Daedelus? You think the Earth legend is connected to the Alteran dispute?" _Two brothers were imprisoned on an island. They built artificial wings of wax and feathers, jumped off the cliff and attempted to fly to safety. The older brother, Daedelus, flew safely to land, but the younger flew too high, the sun melted the soft wax and the wings fell apart, plunging Icarus to his death._ Was the ancient myth some remnant of a truly Ancient parable on the dangers of free thinking?

"I know it is," she said, crossing her arms and looking up at me a bit smugly. "Daniel Jackson repeated something to me. Oma Desala said it to him after he was irradiated, while he was dying of his burns, 'Sometimes getting our wings burned is the only way we learn."'

"She was referring to the Icarii," I walked around the console and began to pace the room, "She may even have been one of them, and there may be more leftover bits of information about them, things we haven't recognized as important. OK, that's a good start... wait a minute..." Fel-thas abruptly stopped me in my pacing and spun me back toward the console, my eyes flashing and my voice reverberating, "When was the database entry locked?"

Hailey went back to the earlier screen, nibbling on her lip in concentration. After a moment, she was able to pull up an entry about the entry.

"OK, when did that 'Lantean ship leave Atlantis? The one that was stranded at the edge of Pegasus?"

It took a few minutes of digging to find that nugget of information.

"They left here before all of the information on the Icarii was restricted. There might still be copies of these records in their shipboard database, and they might only be protected by the ATA gene like most of the records here," she said finally, "Shall I call for a taxi?"

"No, I can do better. When that group of Alterans came back to the City, they brought a copy of the shipboard records with them. I dug through it looking for..." hmmm... better to avoid that conversation, "Here, I'll show you how to access it."

"It looks like a gate address," Carter said, handing the tablet back, "but there are eight symbols, plus a point of origin. Eight symbols dials long distance. What would a ninth chevron do? Can the gate even dial nine chevrons?"

"No," McKay answered, accepting the tablet back, "I tried it with our DHD and I sent a request back to Earth to check there."

Carter shook her head, "The Earth gate can't do it. I wrote most of the code for the SGC DHD and I dug through the original dialer code with Ba'al. The gate crystal won't even have a contact to send it a ninth symbol. You said there was something about a specific planet?"

"Your mini-me managed to unlock some notes in the database about a special power source, a planet with a naquadria core. Unfortunately, the Icarii blew up the first one they were playing with and were hoping to find another, but the rest of the entry was deleted and thoroughly erased."

"That doesn't make sense. Naquadria is artificial. How can they 'find' a planet made of naquadria? Unless..." her forhead creased in thought and she waved her own objection away with her hand, "We created many of the trans-Uranic elements in the lab before we discovered them in nature. Maybe we still don't know as much about naquadria as we thought."

"The Ancients don't use the same word, but it has to be the same stuff. The Goa'uld who created naquadria just rediscovered something the Ancients already knew about and specifically decided **not** to play with," McKay said.

"Something like the solar system you blew up?" Carter asked with a mischevious grin.

"Hey, you blew one up too!"

She stood up and picked up her coffee, "Yeah, but I blew up my star **on purpose**. Send what we have to the SGC and let them follow it up. We've got bigger problems."

I was making my circuit of guerilla worlds as usual, dialing in to Lanira. The moment I stepped through the gate, I knew something was wrong. A hot dry wind hit me full in the face and an angry red glow covered the horizon. I staggered down from the gate platform. A fine layer of ash coated my clothing and the inside of my lungs. My symbiote propelled me to the DHD and immediately dialed to Atlantis, taking long, agonizing moments to make the connection and enter an IDC.

I fell to my hands and knees the moment I cleared the puddle. The gateroom marines rushed to help me, but I waved them back, forcing myself to speak, "Don't touch me. Get a decontamination team." The deck leapt up and slammed into my head.

_Once more, I was running through a blasted landscape, the crater of what was once a village melding into the crater of the now-dry lake. Twisted bodies lay half buried in mud. I ran, shouting, waving the handfull of lillies I had brought with me, brought for her._

_"__Pythia!" I screamed, hopelessly, pointlessly and finally sank into the mud, raging incoherently._

_A few survivors crawled out of the stubble of an old-growth forrest, empty eyes and pale visage as they saw that there was simply nothing to recover, nothing to rebuild. Her body, or most of it, was placed with the others in shallow scrapings in the softer soil of the lakebed, the lillies the only color in a dead landscape. And then they left: some through the gate, some to other villages, leaving me lying where I had fallen by the old lake shore._

"My fault. My fault."

Teyla leaned closer, "What is he saying?"

Dr. Keller shook her head, "He's still drifting in and out of consciousness. I have him sedated while the symbiote heals the damage."

"He'll make it?" Colonel Carter asked.

"The burns are minor. The radiation wasn't lethal— for a Tok'Ra— but it's lucky no one else went with him through the gate. He breathed in a great deal of contaminated dust though. I've flushed his mucus membranes as much as I can and I have him on medications to chelate— bind and remove— the radioactive isotopes," she shrugged, "There isn't much more I can do. Now we just wait and see."

Carter's earpiece chirped. She reached up to key the mike, "Carter. Go ahead." She listened for a moment and touched Dr. Keller's shoulder, "Keep me posted. Major Lorne is back."

I was back in the gym working forms, pushing myself, repeating the moves over and over to block out the images that still crowded my brain. My face was still tight from the burns, my stomach heaved with naseau, but I could not afford to stop moving. Fel-thas was quiet for the moment, a silent but ominous roiling beneath the surface.

Teyla Emagen came in with her Bantu sticks. She stopped and watched me, quickly assessing my mood. Then she made a decision, set the bag down in the corner, and gestured with the sticks, "Would you like a partner?"

I nodded and took two of the sticks she offered. We faced off, each gave a slight bow, and then set at each other in controlled fury, circling each other, sticks flicking out, clacking together and retracting back into protective stance. She too needed the distraction, and we beat the tar out of each other in companionable silence for some time before, by mutual agreement, each of us took a step back and lowered our arms, breathing heavily.

"How many?" I finally asked.

"Two more," she answered between breaths, "No survivors. Major Shepherd is working on evacuating some of the worlds we know are in the path of the Replicators."

I nodded and raised the sticks. She raised hers and we started circling again. A few minutes later, another pause to breathe.

"You made yourself their leader. They trusted you. It is only natural that you should blame yourself. But it is not your fault any more than it is Doctor McKay's."

"Then whose fault is it?" I spat angrily.

"No one's. This is _war_. People die."

"It is always war," I said, turning away for a moment, my knuckles white on the dark lacquered sticks. I smell the acrid stench of burned flesh, the stink of fear and spilled bowels. I hear the screams of children torn away from their mothers by Jaffa. My hand tingles as I mangle a man's mind with a hand device. Centuries of Tok'Ra and millenia of Goa'uld violence: experienced, witnessed, enacted, parade through my mind. My eyes flash as I try desperately to stay in control. Teyla takes an involuntary step back but does not go. "It is always war and we are always on the brink of disaster. I have expended lifetime after human lifetime to make a difference. People who trust me die... and sometimes not quickly enough." A broken body lies in my arms, covered by the marks of torture; torture only endurable by a Tok'Ra and only through repeated use of a sarcophagus. In the end, it is my own hand that kills both host and symbiote, that ends their pain. Again and again, my failures have been the cause of suffering, misery, and death.

"I know, Jason. Believe me, I _know_ what you feel."

I bite back the cruel response, answer more slowly, "Your people. The Athosians who are missing. Is there any news?"

"None. But I will not stop looking. Not ever."

I imagine her nightmares for a moment: her people, in the hold of a Wraith ship perhaps, being fed upon one by one. Maybe the subject of experiments. Dwindling, dying, losing hope. Blaming the leader who abandoned them, the leader who is part Wraith, part monster herself, the leader who allied herself with aliens from far away. That is what she most feared, what she could least endure. I shudder and get control once more, letting the sticks clatter to the ground.

I clasp her shoulder, meet her eyes for a moment and walk out of the gym.

I am sitting in Atlantis' small chapel when Colonel Carter finds me. She sits down beside me, making the sign of the cross, bows her head for a moment, then asks, "Am I interrupting?"

"I didn't know you were religious," I say, a little taken aback.

"I'm not especially. My mother was Catholic and my dad went along to humour her when he wasn't deployed somewhere. My mom before she died, my brother, and I went to church and I got sent to Sunday school. I _wanted_ to believe in something. I still come in here once in a while and see if I can catch a piece of whatever it was that gave my Mom such... serenity and purpose."

"But you don't find it," I offered.

"No," she said, chagrined, "I like solid proof, tangible evidence. I don't believe in anything unless I can take it apart. I took the stereo apart when I was a kid. God, was my mother mad, but I just wanted to see how it worked... and I did put it back together. I tried to do the same thing to the Bible, but it didn't work the same when I was done. It's just so full of inconsistencies and unanswered questions: where did Mrs. Cain come from, anyway? How can there have been 'day' before the Sun was first made? Why are there two geneologies for Jesus and why don't they match up?"

"Your Sunday School teacher must have loved you," I laughed.

She sniggered, "It was _agony_. I was bored. I got in trouble for asking too many questions... and I took all of the screws out of the teacher's desk... But at the same time, I can't look at the sky and not feel a sense of wonder. Did you ever read C.S. Lewis?"

"What, like 'the Lion, the Witch, and the Warddrobe'? Doesn't every kid?"

"I loved that book," she said, "Dad would read them to me when he came home. I went around poking the backs of all the closets to see if there was a secret world somewhere, a doorway I could just walk through and explore. The space program was the closest thing I could find to being able to visit another _world_."

"Hmm, _Dawn Treader_ was my favorite; I've always loved the ocean," I sweep my arm in the general direction of the tower and the gate room, "Now you've got the stargate: you walk through a doorway and go places, see wonders, meet strange beings. Fauns and talking beasts must not seem that fantastic anymore."

"I know. My dad kept thinking I was heart broken because I didn't get into the space program. I couldn't tell him that NASA had been my second choice anyway, that I had actually found the wardrobe! But I never found a big lion to tell me what it all meant or to bail me out when I got in over my head."

"It's never quite that easy is it? But sometimes He's there if you listen for him; He'll act through you if you can let go of control long enough."

"I'm not very good at letting go of control... or of listening for secret messages. My own mind doesn't shut up long enough." she pauses for a moment and looks at me hard, "Do you really think that everyone who doesn't believe in God is damned?"

I look at the non-descript altar at the front of the room, think of the different people who use it, most of them Christian in this facility, but not all. I think of the hundreds of worlds which have never heard of the Messiah I believe in. Finally, I shrug, "I don't think God has to spend much time punishing people for not believing or doing the right thing. In the end, I think we do a good job of _punishing ourselves_ by doing something other than what we are meant to do."

"Blaise Pascal, the mathematician, said that if believe in God but He's not really there, it doesn't hurt us, but if we don't believe and He IS there, we're screwed, so it's better to believe and be wrong," Carter sweeps her hand in negation, "I always thought that was a cop-out."

"Me, too. Seems like any God would have to know whether your belief was sincere or not. If you just fake belief because you're afraid of dying, I don't know that it will count for much."

We both fell silent for a moment, watching the flicker of candlelight from the small side table.

"You've heard about Weir and the duplicates the Replicators made?" she asked.

"Yeah, I talked with McKay when he was working on that tracking device. Being brought back from the dead like that... for that matter, the other team members finding out that they were manufactured clones: pretty freaky. Makes you wonder what we are, what actually makes us _us_."

"It also makes you wonder how they actually did it. Sure, we expected them to copy Elizabeth's memories, because she had nanites insider her, working in her brain, but they made new bodies and transmitted memories _into_ them. "

"...and when did they have a chance to make complete, recent copies of the other team members?" I ask.

"It seems unlikely the Assurans would have been able to scan the complete contents of their brains," she suggests.

"Which means that the Replicators have the technology I'm looking for," I finish, "The tracking device tells us where all their ships are. I need to capture a ship — and its database— intact."

"The Oddessey and the Apollo are on their way to Atlantis to help us stop the Replicator attacks. I can tell you that trying to capture one isn't going to be a popular idea, but, if Rodney's weapon works, we may get an opportunity."


	8. Ch 7 Inside Information

Chapter 7  
>Inside Information<p>

Several dozen ships are visible in the viewport against the backdrop of the planet. Beneath swirls of cloud, the large landmass illuminated by the primary is crisscrossed by networks of lines and the geometric shapes of heavy industrial development. There is a striking lack of green for a clearly inhabited planet. Most of the ships are Ancient Aurora-class warships. Several other kinds of vessals are maneuvering in and out of them, including Wraith hiveships, Earth's X-304s, and several smaller capital ships of some unknown design. Lances of fire flick back and forth between them, blinding flashes illuminating expanding pockets of dust and gas from ships already damaged, their contents and their crews disgorging into naked vacuum. Smaller attack craft also swarm among them, attacking capital ships, intercepting each other, dying in brief fireballs of their own.

Suddenly the battle shifts as most of the Ancient-design warships stop maneuvering and cease defending themselves.

"What the hell?" Major Marks exclaims.

Rivers of glittering particles stream from these Aurora-class vessals, converging on the landmass below where a vast city of technological marvels is dying.

Colonel Ellis grins, "Son of a bitch! He actually did it." For a moment, he stares, absorbing the beauty of the river of nanites, then he nods to the Major who thumbs the com button, "Away boarding party! Away boarding party!"

I materialize in the Auxiliary Control Room of the Replicator ship. Angry red lights flash warnings from several consoles, illuminating the other three members of my team in white skin suits, faces hidden by their visors. I hit a button on my wrist to select the group communications channel and key the pickup with my chin, "Team 2, this is Team 1 Actual, what is your status? Over."

Lieutenant Hailey's voice comes back to me over the headset,"Team 1, this is Team 2 Actual. All present and accounted for. Area secure. Over."

"Team 2, wait one," I say, and approach the nearest console. A schematic of the ship shows eight life signs and... zero replicators. I gesture to the two marines who lower and sling their ARGs, taking up station in the doorway. The scientist, Brody, goes to another console. As we expected, the atmosphere is thin. Battle damage and the abrupt departure of the replicators left tiny hull breaches all over the ship, most of them too small to even leak air, but several were substantial. Force fields now plugged many of the gaps and life support struggled to catch up.

_"_Why do robots bother with air, anyway?" Brody asked over the local channel as he shut down life support completely; we would need the power and network links for other things.

I switched displays to show the ship systems and damage indicators. The hyperdrive was offline and inoperable, a major control link showing damage, "Team 2, Team 1 Actual. As we expected, the primary control link is severed forward of frame 32. The replicators have already begun work rerouting hyperdrive functions. Execute repair plan. _Execute repair plan_. The clock is ticking. Over."

"Wilco, Team 1. Executing repair plan. Team 2 out."

"Team 1 out," I reply, and turn to the others in the control room, switching back to the short-range team channel, "The life support umbilical will be under that console. Make sure your O2 is topped off. We don't know how long it will be until we can afford to get life support back online."

We take turns hooking up to the oxygen line as we work, our suits modified ahead of time to use the damage control facilities of the Ancient ships which we hoped the replicators still copied faithfully. I unstrap a tablet computer and hook it into the console, activating several pre-configure database searches and beaming the results back to the Apollo. If we cannot get the replicator ship underway by the time the planet is scheduled to explode, then we might still get some useful information. I watch the progress on the repair and listen anxiously to the fleet-level comm chatter as Dr. McKay prepares to overload the ZPMs and destroy the replicator Blobzilla.

By this time, we have a chat program running on the shipboard computer system where we can communicate between the teams, view eachother's displays and directly collaborate on the repairs. Lieutenant Hailey has managed to reroute all of the hyperdrive systems through an alternate network, but the alternate link was not designed to handle all of the data from the navigational system on top of its normal functions. Traffic is bogging down on our improvised network and systems are failing all over the ship. We start shutting down as many systems as we can to reduce traffic, but the whole network is now running sluggishly and the offending systems don't always respond to their shutdown commands.

A few lines of text come painfully through the chat link, "OK, the problem is that the hyperdrive core is now locked up and needs to be cold-booted, but I can't transfer enough data over this link to boot the system, even if we shut down everything we don't need. All of the subsystems are trying to reinitialize at the same time."

"What Would a Replicator Do?" Brody asked.

"What?"

"OK," he continued, "Assuming the replicators knew what they were doing, they had a way around this. They chose to reroute the network over the same links we were going to use. They had a plan." Down on the planet, BlobZilla was sinking into the crust and the ZPMs did not overload like they were supposed to. That gave us a little more time until Carter and McKay came up with a new plan. The ship shuddered from an impact with floating debris, the shields not responding properly. _Probably not much time._

I look carefully at the damage control console, at the list of activities the replicators had underway before we arrived. Most of it we had ignored: we did not need fire control, for instance, and did not have enough crew to simultaneously fix so many different systems.

"Aha!" there is a new control crystal in the job queue. The data needed to reinizialize the hyperdrive was being written to a crystal in the damage control console— the one I am standing at. I drop to my knees and slide out a tray. _There_, the translucent green crystal. I hand the crystal to Brody and open the channel back to Apollo, "Apollo, this is the Boarding Party. Brody requires transport to our Hyperdrive Core."

The scientist vanishes in a flash of light. In a few moments, I see a status update on my console as the hyperdrive begins its startup routine, this time without overloading the network. Then the network bogs down as the hyperdrive updates its navigational data.

"Transfer slow, but working..." appears in my chat window.

The ship shudders again and this time, does not stop. The planet is becoming unstable and the overloaded autopilot cannot keep up.

"Boarding Party, this is Apollo. We are out of time. Are you go?"

The status board turns green, "Apollo, Boarding Party. We are go. We're prepared to bug out once everyone else is clear. Over."

There is another flash of light as a skin-suited Kevin Marks appears in the control room.

Colonel Ellis' voice comes over the comm, "Boarding Party, this is Apollo Actual. Major Marks has command of the prize. Good luck and God speed. Apollo out."

The swirling vortices of hyperspace windows appear and ships disappear as the alliance fleet, slightly smaller now, starts on its way home. soon, they are all gone except one Wraith cruiser, the empty hulks of lifeless replicator ships, and ourselves. I am standing with Marks at the console, looking over the short-range sensors. "Why is that one still behind," I ask, "Is it damaged?"

Marks looks over the scans of the Wraith ship, "No, I don't think so, and I'd rather not contact them to find out. They're not supposed to know we're stealing Ancient ships under their noses. This one was supposed to fly TARCAP over the replicator city, to keep them from launching against our ships in orbit. It looks like it's taking longer to recover their darts still in the atmosphere."

We watch anxiously as two dart icons crawl back toward the Wraith cruiser while the planet is breaking up underneath us. Finally, the icons merge with the mothership.

"They are entering hyperspace," I say.

"Go," Marks says.

Our drive engages, opening a hole in space in front of us. We race to enter it just as the planet collapses, its crust expanding in a glowing cloud of dust, radiation, and gas.


End file.
